Tag Archives: Visual Studio 2015

Starting April of 2016, Visual Studio now includes Xamarin for free. This is the case for every edition of Visual Studio, including Visual Studio Community Edition, which is free as well.

With Xamarin you can develop and publish native apps for iOS and Android using C# or F# from directly within Visual Studio with no limits on app size.

For developers that are using Mac, Xamarin Studio is now available as a benefit of your Visual Studio Professional or Enterprise subscription. Developers can use the newly-created Xamarin Studio Community Edition for free.

You can visit Xamarin’s store to download Xamarin for free. Keep in mind that, Xamarin, although free, is license restricted for bigger companies. If you want to use Xamarin you will need to comply to one of the following license terms:

Individual license – If you are an individual working on your own applications to sell or for any other purpose, you may use the software to develop and test those applications.

Organization licenses – If you are an organization, your users may use the software as follows:

Any number of your users may use the software to develop and test your applications released under Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved open source software licenses.

Any number of your users may use the software to develop and test extensions to Visual Studio.

Any number of your users may use the software to develop and test your applications as part of online or in person classroom training and education, or for performing academic research.

If none of the above apply, and you are also not an enterprise (defined below), then up to 5 of your individual users can use the software concurrently to develop and test your applications.

If you are an enterprise, your employees and contractors may not use the software to develop or test your applications, except for open source and education purposes as permitted above. An enterprise is any organization and its affiliates who collectively have either (a) more than 250 PCs or users or (b) more than one million US dollars (or the equivalent in other currencies) in annual revenues, and enterprise means those entities that control (via majority ownership), are controlled by, or are under common control with an organization.

Demo use – The uses permitted above include use of the software in demonstrating your applications.

On July 20th 2015, the new Visual Studio 2015 and .NET Framework 4.6 by Microsoft became available to download.

This release is a big step to bring the productivity of these products to any developer working on any kind of application, while delivering a new level of innovation in the productivity.

Visual Studio 2015 is an integrated development environment from Microsoft with a comprehensive collection of developer tools and services, used to create apps, as well as web sites and web services.

The Visual Studio family has expanded over the years:

Visual Studio Community – a free for non-enterprise development, fully -featured, and extensible IDE for creating modern applications for Windows, Android, and iOS, as well as web applications and cloud services

Visual Studio Online – services for teams to share code, track work, and ship software – for any language, all in a single package

Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6 highlights

Innovation in productivity

Debugging and Diagnostics – unified debugging and profiling into single Diagnostics Tool window; with PrefTips you can get performance information right in your code

Code editing and Refactoring – C# and VB developers can use the new Roslyn-based tooling, including Light Bulbs that pro-actively suggest potential fixes or code refactoring tooling; with code analyzers it is possible to customize warnings and suggestions delivered inside the editor; added XAML editor

Programming Languages – this new release includes the final version of C# 6 and Visual Basic 14 and improved support for C++ 11/14/17 together with TypeScript 1.5, F# 4.0 and tools for Python and dozens of other languages

Microsoft announced that on July 20th 2015, there will be a final release of Visual Studio 2015, .NET Framework 4.6 and Team Foundation Server 2015.

Visual Studio 2015 is a long expected release, which will include multi-platform creation of apps for Windows, Android, iOS, as well as creation of web applications and cloud services, and more. It also offers a wide range of tools to increase and ease the productivity of developers, like diagnostics tools, integrated editors, debuggers and profiles, plus thousands of extensions from PHP to gaming.